Shii News – Academic Items
1.The first workshop of the Persianate Subalterns project – on pre-Safavid subalterns – will take place on 7-8 November, 2015 in Edinburgh, UK. To register for free live-streaming of this event, and for further information, and information on our Twitter feed, please visit:
2. Lecture – Manouchehr Moshtagh Khorasani, “Persian Fire and Steel: Historical Firearms of Iran” (London, 6 Nov)
by Pradines Aga
Persian Fire and Steel: Historical Firearms of Iran
By Dr Manouchehr Moshtagh Khorasani
Friday 6 November 2015, 17:30– 19:00
Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations
210 Euston Road
London NW1 2DA
Abstract
The first part of the lecture will introduce a series of Persian manuscripts on production and typology of historical firearms in Iran, including the earliest known Persian manuscript on firearms from the Safavid period.
The second part will show a selection of 100 unique examples of Persian firearms from the Military Museum of Tehran, which belonged to the personal royal collection of Nāsser al-Din Shāh Qājār. These include matchlock, flintlock and percussion cap muskets, pistols, cannons and other items which had been collected from the early Safavid period. Persian cannons, howitzers and mortars from the Artillery Museum of St. Petersburg will also be shown.
Speaker
Dr. Manouchehr Moshtagh Khorasani is a specialist in Persian/Iranian arms and armor. He has written five books, co-authored four books and published 147 print articles in different journals across the world. He won the prestigious awards of the Book Prize of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2009 and 2012.
Chair
Dr. Stephane Pradines
Registration
The event is free but tickets are limited. To attend in person, please book your place here.
The event will be also broadcast online. Please register your attendance to the webinar here.
3. Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici – Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
MPI, November 5 – 07, 2015
Collecting and Empires
The Impact of the Creation and Dissolution of Empires on Collections
and Museums from Antiquity to the Present
Venue
5 – 6 November LdM Church Auditorium (San Jacopo in Campo Corbolini),
via Faenza 43, 50123 Florence
7 November Kunsthistorisches Institut – Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai,
via dei Servi 51, 50122 Florence
PROGRAMME
Thursday 5 November
Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici – San Jacopo in Campo Corbolini, via Faenza
43, 50123 Florence
8:30
Welcome and Opening Remarks – Rappresentanti degli enti coinvolti
Royal Collections in the Ancient World
Chair: Maia Wellington Gahtan
9.00
Zainab Bahrani (Columbia University, New York)
The biopolitics of collecting: Empires of Mesopotamia
10:00
Alain Schnapp (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris)
The idea of collecting from Mesopotamia to the classical world,
convergences and divergences
Coffee/ Tea
11:30
Carrie Vout (University of Cambridge, Cambridge)
Collecting like Caesar: the pornography and paideia of amassing
artefacts in the Roman Empire
12:30
Michèle Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens (École pratique des Hautes Études, Paris)
Princely treasures and imperial expansion in Western Han China (2nd-1st
c. BCE)
Collections and questions of national identity
Chair: Daniel J. Sherman
15:00
Enrique Florescano (Conaculta, México)
The Mexica Empire: Memory, Identity, And Collectionism
16:00
Dominique Poulot (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris)
Empire and Museums: the case of Napoleon I
Coffee/ Tea
17:30
Christoph Zuschlag (Universität Koblenz-Landau, Landau)
Looted Art, Booty Art, Degenerate Art – Aspects of Art Collecting in
the Third Reich
18:30
Katia Dianina (University of Virginia, Charlottesville)
The Dispersal of the Russian Art Empire
Friday, 6 November
Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici – San Jacopo in Campo Corbolini, via Faenza
43, 50123 Florence
Expanding empires – morning session
Chair: Eva Maria Troelenberg
9:00
Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
Material versus Visual culture: Collecting, Dispersing and Display in
Imperial Dynamics (400 – 1600)
10:00
Catarina Schmidt Arcangeli (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
Collecting in Venice and Creating a Myth
Coffee/ Tea
11:30
Hannah Baader (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
– title to be confirmed-
12:30
Michael North (Ernst Moritz Arndt Universität Greifswald, Greifswald)
Collecting European and Asian Art Objects in the Dutch Colonial Empire,
17th and 18th Centuries
Lunch
Expanding empires – afternoon session
Chair: Francesca Baldry
15:00
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Princeton University, Princeton)
Habsburg Imperial Collecting
16:00
Ebba Koch (Universität Wien, Vienna)
The Mughal emperors as collectors: Jahangir (rul. 1605-27) and Shah
Jahan (rul. 1628-58)
Coffee/ Tea
17:30
Tapati Guha-Thakurta (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta)
The Object Flows of Empire: Cross-Cultural Collecting in Early Colonial
India
18:30
Ruth B. Phillips (Carleton University, Ottawa)
Imperfect Translations: Indigenous Gifts and Royal Collecting in
Victorian Canada
Aperitivo
21:00
Concert
Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini – Sala del Buonumore, Piazza delle Belle
Arti 2, 50122 Florence
L’Ensemble Marâghî – Ottoman Classical Music
Music of the Habsburg Empire, directed by Maestra Daniela De Santis
Saturday, 7 November
Kunsthistorisches Institut – Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai, via dei
Servi 51, 50122 Florence
Late and Post-Empire, De-Colonization and Museums
Chair: Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
9:00
Edhem Eldem (Bogaziçi University, Istanbul)
Ottoman Imperial Collections in the Nineteenth Century: A Critical
Reassessment
10:00
Eva Maria Troelenberg (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
Collecting Big: Monumentality and the Berlin Museum Island as a “World
Museum” between the Imperial and Post-Imperial Age
Coffee/ Tea
11:30
Daniel J. Sherman (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel
Hill)
The (De) Colonized Object: Museums and the Other in France since 1960
12:30
Wendy Shaw (Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin)
Islam and the Legacies of Empire: Ownership of Islam in 21st-Century
Museums
15:00
Roundtable
Moderated by Krzysztof Pomian (Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika, Torun;
Ecole des hautes Études)
For more information, contact Myra Stals, myra.stals@lorenzodemedici.it
—-
The creation and dissolution of empires has been a constant feature of
human history from ancient times through the present day, especially if
one passes from a historical to a theoretical definition of empire as
an open expanding global frontier. Establishing new identities and new
power relationships to coincide with changing political boundaries and
cultural reaches, empires also destroyed and/or irrevocably altered
social structures and the material culture on which those social
structures were partly based. The political activities of empires—both
formal and informal to use Doyle’s definition—find their material
reflection in the creation of new art forms and the reevaluation of old
art forms which often involved the movement of objects from periphery
to center (and vice versa) and promoted the formation of new
collections. New mentalities and new social relationships were
represented by those collections but they were (and are) also fostered
through them.
In recent decades such issues surrounding objects and empire have
become important components of our understanding of British
colonialism, and to a lesser extent of anthropological approaches to
colonial studies more broadly conceived. Concurrent with these
developments, comparative studies of the political forms of empires
have also appeared, though the baseline for such comparisons is
invariably the Roman Empire, from whose imperium we derive our word,
but which is ill-suited to describe post-WW-II hegemonies or even Asian
historical examples. This conference seeks to cast a wider net
temporally, spatially and conceptually by exploring the impact of the
expansion and contraction of empires on collecting, collections, and
collateral phenomena such as cultural exchange in a selection of the
greatest empires the world has known from Han China to Hellenistic
Greece to Aztec Mexico to the Third Reich without privileging
particular political models and always with an eye to how these
historical situations invite comparisons not only with each other but
also with contemporary imperial tendencies.
While some scholars would argue that the term empire no longer applies
to today’s global and transnational environment, others have redefined
‘empire’ in terms of contemporary capitalism and a developing
post-modern global order. Exclusively based on political and economic
concerns (including identity politics) and for the most part
distressingly Eurocentric, these analyses of empire or its evolution
into something else yet to be defined, also neglect the impact of
material culture, even though material culture studies have made great
strides in recent decades by addressing issues of the migration of
objects and people for both political and non-political reasons.
Therefore by investigating empires and imperialism in a comparative
manner through the lens of collecting practices, museum archetypes and
museums proper, it is hoped that this conference workshop will help
shape our understanding of what is indeed imperial about our own
approach to material culture.
Contribution to Scholarship: While individual empires have been studied
extensively, it is only in recent decades that they have been examined
from comparative political, social and cultural perspectives. It is
also only recently that scholarship in history of collecting and
anthropology has begun to address the role imperial expansion on
collecting and museums in reference to European and particularly
British colonialism. Still there is very little written on the history
of collecting from any perspective outside of the European tradition or
from before the Renaissance. This conference would—for the first
time—approach the subject of collecting and empires from a global and
inclusive comparative perspective, from which it is hoped that
significant conclusions may be drawn about the social, cultural and
political impact of collecting and display across the centuries and
down to present times.
Reference / Quellennachweis:
CONF: Collecting and Empires (Florenz, 5-7 Nov 15). In: H-ArtHist, Oct
23, 2015. <http://arthist.net/archive/11289>.
4. 13th Annual Duke-UNC Islamic Studies Graduate Student Workshop on “Global Muslim Modernities and the Post-Secular”, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 27-28 February 2016
The concepts of “modernity” and “secularism” have received renewed attention within academic literature on Muslim societies and Islamic studies. This year’s conference aspires to create a forum for those exploring innovative engagements with this material from an interdisciplinary perspective drawing on critical theory and global approaches. Ph.D. students are especially encouraged to apply.
Deadline for abstracts: 1 December 2015. Information: DUKEUNCconf@gmail.com
5. Graduate Student Conference “Islam and the Modern State”, Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern, Evanston, IL, 7-8 April 2016
The conference will examine how modern states exist in tension with the practices, institutions, and sensibilities associated with Islam. This interdisciplinary conference will draw together advanced graduate students and senior scholars to probe the enduring entanglement of religion and modernity.
Deadline for abstracts: 9 November 2015. Information: http://buffett.northwestern.edu/programs/grad-conference/index.html
6. MENA Workshop Program for PhD Students in Beirut (May 2016) and Cairo (September 2016)
The American Political Science Association (APSA) is now accepting applications for this two-part workshop program. This is a unique opportunity to network with colleagues from across the MENA region and develop current research related to civil society in the Arab region and the changing state-society dynamics engendered by the Arab Uprisings post-2010.
Deadline for applications: 2 December 2015. Information: www.apsanet.org/menaworkshops
7. Professor/Associate Professor in Modern Gulf History, Centre for Gulf Studies, Qatar University
Qualifications: A doctorate in History with specialization in the Gulf, with significant record of; relevant and evidence of superior teaching experience, etc.
Deadline for application: 30 November 2015. Information: https://careers.qu.edu.qa/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?OAFunc=IRC_EID_VIS_INTG_GATEWAY&p_action=viewPosting&p_svid=9016&p_spid=440135&p_srid=239166
8. Associate Professor of Literature and Culture in the Gulf, Qatar University
Qualifications: A doctorate in Literature and Culture with specialization in Identity, Gender, Literature and Culture in the Gulf, with significant record of publications in this field; superior teaching experience; fluency in Arabic and English.
Deadline for application: 30 November 2015. Information: https://careers.qu.edu.qa/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?OAFunc=IRC_EID_VIS_INTG_GATEWAY&p_action=viewPosting&p_svid=4346&p_spid=202145&p_srid=111182
9. Post-doctoral, Visiting Research and Sabbatical Fellowships, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore
MEI is offering up to two Visiting Sabbatical Fellowships for 2016-1017 and one or two post-doctoral Fellowships for two years, ideally from 1 August 2016 to 31 July 2018. The fellowships are for recent Ph.D. recipients in the social sciences or humanities working on anthropological, cultural, economic, historical, political, religious, or sociological topics in the greater Middle East region, especially on contemporary studies of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, Iran, and Turkey.
Information: https://mei.nus.edu.sg/index.php/web/new-job-opening
10. Jeffrey H. Aronson Chair in Middle East Politics, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University – http://apply.interfolio.com/31675
Aga Khan Chair in Islamic Humanities, Brown University – www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=51860
Visiting Scholar in Islamic Studies, California State University, Fresno – www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=51858
Assistant Professor in Islamic Middle Eastern History University of West Georgia – www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=51866
Assistant Professor, Islamic Middle Eastern History; University of West Georgia – www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=51866
11. The third Conference of the School of Mamlūk Studies will take place in Chicago, 23-25 June, 2016
Panel proposal “Authors as Readers”
Call for papers
Before composing a book, any author reads. In the Mamluk period—an example in terms of intellectual vivacity—scholars and books travel easily, ideas are extensively discussed and shared, scholars’ life is intense and prolific… How to compose a book in such a context of information overload? We are lucky enough to have at our disposal very precise sources about scholars’ biography, consisting in biographical notes, exceptional documents such as personal notebooks and reading journals, or paratexts in manuscripts attesting of their reading/borrowing/purchasing… These provide us with a more intimate insight of the scholars’ tastes and reading activity.
Many fascinating questions can be approached thanks to these sources. What did scholars like to read? How often and how much did they read? How did they use their readings for their works? What do we know of their note-taking strategies? Did Mamluk scholars use special devices to remember what they read/listen to? How did they gain access to books?
These are only a few questions that could be dealt with in the frame of this panel. The goal of the panel is to show authors as readers in the context of the Mamluk period, a rich and age-old tradition.
Please submit your paper abstract (300 words max) and a one-page CV for consideration before November 20, 2015 to elise.franssen@ulg.ac.be.
Participants whose proposal is accepted will be notified by November 27, 2015.
Please have a look at the following page for practical information regarding the Third SMS Conference: http://mamluk.uchicago.edu/school-of-mamluk-studies.html.
Élise Franssen, post-doc
University of Liège (ULg), Belgium
elise.franssen@ulg.ac.be
12. ANN: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past (New York,
26 Oct 15-17 Jan 16)
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 East 84th St. New
York, NY 10028, October 26, 2015 – January 17, 2016
Lecture Series: The Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the
Persian Past
Each will have a reception to follow and RSVP is required. RSVP
212.992.7800 or isaw.nyu.edu/rsvp
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Nasseredin Shah and his 84 Wives
Beate Petersen, Film Director and Producer
Film Screening, 6 pm
In 1842 the 11 year-old heir to the Persian throne received a camera
from Queen Victoria of England. The young heir fell in love with the
magical contraption. In the following decades he documented his life,
revealing to the public eye, what it was never supposed to see.
“Nasseredin Shah and his 84 Wives” is based on the photos taken by the
Shah himself, as well as by his court. With the addition of animated
sequences, it tells the story of the rivalry and intrigues within the
harem, the murders, the corruption, the political power struggle, the
murders, and of Persia’s troubled relation to Europe. The documentary
focuses on an aspect that is all too often overlooked: that is, the
influential role played by women in the origins of modern Iran.
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
The Discursive Spaces of Qajar Photography
Mirjam Brusius, University of Oxford
Public Lecture, 6 pm
When the mid-19th Century European travellers documented Persia’s
heritage with a photographic camera, many compiled albums that came to
have ubiquitous aesthetic and political functions. Consequently, in the
20th century, some of the albums ended up in different discursive
spaces: some can be found in state archives as diplomatic gifts
compiled by the Shah, some became indispensable tools for
archaeologists, others were admired by Islamic art curators in museums
for their lacquerwork bindings. This lecture explores some of the
fascinating biographies of these albums, including the impact they
still have today.
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Qajar Photography and Contemporary Iranian Art
Layla S. Diba, Independent Scholar and Art Advisor
Public Lecture, 6 pm
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Ancient Persianisms: Persepolitan Motifs in 19th Century Qajar Persia
Judith A. Lerner, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
Public Lecture, 6 pm
Pre-Islamic imagery – specifically that of the Achaemenid (c. 550-330
BCE) and Sasanian (224-651 CE) dynasties – had remained strong in the
art of Islamic Iran (post-651 CE); the major pictorial themes of razm
u bazm (fighting and feasting), along with hunting and enthronement,
continued through successive Islamic dynasties in painting, metalwork,
ceramics and textiles, all artistic media that were prominent in
pre-Islamic Iran. But one medium of the pre-Islamic period had all
but disappeared: monumental relief sculpture carved into living rock.
This ancient artistic medium had been dormant for more than a
millennium when it was revived under the second Qajar ruler, Fath ‘Ali
Shah (r. 1797-1834). During his reign all but one of the eight known
Qajar rock reliefs were carved; after his reign – except for one relief
executed in 1878 by his great-grandson, Naser al-Din Shah (r.
1848-1896) – monumental sculptured reliefs were no longer made.
Instead, relief carving on a much smaller scale was used for
embellishing the stone foundations of Qajar buildings. The stylistic
and iconographic contrasts between these two modes of sculptural
expression is striking: the earlier Qajar reliefs draw upon those of
the Sasanians, the last Persian dynasty before the Muslim conquest, and
feature enthronement and hunting scenes, while the later ones quote
those of the earlier Achaemenids, specifically images from their
capital city, Persepolis. What brought about this change? In this talk
I offer some reasons for this shift from Sasanian to Achaemenid imagery
and propose that it stemmed, in great part, from the desire in Iran to
forge a modern national identity that drew upon Iran’s imperial
pre-Islamic past. Select photographic examples of these reliefs and
monuments which provided the inspiration for the Qajar pieces, and
which form part of ISAW’s exhibition, Eye of the Shah: Royal Court
Photography and the Persian Past, will be discussed in the context of
“Persianisms.”
The Series is part of the exhibition ‘The Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court
Photography and the Persian Past’, which presents some 200 photographic
prints, a number of vintage photographic albums, and memorabilia that
utilized formal portraiture of the shah, the exhibition shows how
photographers – many of them engaged by Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (r.
1848-1896), the longest reigning Shah of the Qajar Dynasty (1785-1925)
– ultimately created a portrait of the country’s ancient and recent
past. Most of the photographs in the exhibition have never been
publicly displayed.
Further details: http://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibitions/shah
Reference / Quellennachweis:
ANN: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past (New York, 26 Oct
15-17 Jan 16). In: H-ArtHist, Oct 27, 2015.
<http://arthist.net/archive/11358>.
Posted in: Academic items
- October 28, 2015
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